Emergence of Transforming Wellbeing Theory (TWT) Tutorial

Adjunct to the

Majority of global problems and business challenges are byproducts of poor human attitude and behavior. Communities, societies, businesses, and organizations, basically everyone needs help with transformations. People often tend to perceive changes as something difficult, impossible, and mystical, thus are willing to avoid them. That attitude naturally leads to poorer decisions and consequent behavioral outcomes. This science-driven tutorial demystifies transformation by introducing:

Transforming Wellbeing Theory (TWT) — that explains the essentials of and inevitable necessity for transformation,

Typology of Change — that clarifies the variety of different changes, and

Transforming Wellbeing Theory

Transforming Wellbeing Theory is emerging as an inevitable response to the ever-growing imbalance in our lives across the globe [15]. Over the decades, we have been advancing technologies to make our lives better and businesses growing. The fundamental question still remains: with all the evolving technologies, are we gaining decent success in achieving healthier societies and well performing organizations? Every crucial domain of our lives continuously provides evidence of how things are getting imbalanced despite us making huge progress in building increasingly capable innovations. This work summarizes the state-of-the-art scientific insights and practical applications to transform lives and accelerate businesses at global scale.

Present knowledge on persuasive technology often reveals how behavior change designs and interventions are limited in sustaining their effects [5-6]. There is an increasing need for novel ways to design technology that helps people not only to achieve their goals, but also to support sustaining their newly developed habits. Transforming innovations should ultimately empower people and organizations to succeed in their desired and more often even inevitable changes. Thus, the theory aims at extending the understanding beyond limitations of traditional change management and behavioral designs.

The theory is highly instrumental for organizations and communities that are designing for and undergoing transformations, as it provides and helps internalizing easy to use methods and tools for achieving permanent behavior change. This science-driven work embodies advanced knowledge on how to design sustainable changes, including Typology of Change and Transforming Framework.

Typology of Change

Scientific literature [1] [3-4] [16] reveals three general types of change: transactional, transitional, and transformational (Fig. 1). Transactional change is usually defined as an occurrence producing an outcome that differs from previous preferences. Then, transitional change is often defined as a period, in which certain outcomes significantly differ from what was habitual before. However, transformational change manifests itself as a continuum having direction as well as magnitude to produce apparently irreversible shifts.

Fig. 1. Typology of Change.

The three types of change have their characteristics, including general descriptions, overall perspective, perceived timelines, orientations, nature, metrics, underlying psychology, and some examples provided in Table 1.

Event

This is the fourth sequential event succeeding the “Persuasive Urban Mobility” workshop in 2015, the “Empowering Cities for Sustainable Wellbeing” workshop in 2016, and the “Transforming Sociotech Design” tutorial in 2018. The number of participants has significantly grown over these events, which evidences their importance and relevance to the Persuasive Technology community, especially the conference participants. This upgraded tutorial will introduce and explain how the

This tutorial addresses highly important research direction that influences the future of PT and ways to properly and ethically design our ever-increasing technology-supported environments. The PT community will benefit from the advanced knowledge and immediate capacity of applying the fundamental strategies and frameworks to transform lives.

What Needs to be Transformed in Australia?

Most of us strive for better lives and businesses, however rarely we get to celebrate victories of actual transformations of habits, behaviors, and thoughts.

Prof. Agnis Stibe blends science and practice to help people gaining rich understanding on how transformation works, what are its essential components, how to design and apply influential strategies, what novel technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and advanced sensing) are effectively facilitating the change process, and what to do first thing each morning.

Coaching Your Managers

We want changes, but oftentimes we don't know how to make transformations succeed. Meeting Agnis will help you develop and internalize the necessary competences for revolutionizing your future.

Discover new business opportunities. Discover Latvia.

Keynote

Do we think about our wellbeing at all? Yes, of course, we do. But when and how often do we really remember about its essential place in our lives? Do we keep wellbeing in our minds when we launch a car in the space, when we race for profit, or when we trade our cultures and values? What about our cities – the spaces many live in each day? Can urban forms augment human nature to help everyone transforming towards better lives?

This thought-provoking talk will expand beliefs about ways how emerging technologies can transform societies and businesses already today. It will provide sharper understanding on how the Theory of Transforming Wellbeing empowers us to create innovations that make our envisioned changes but also oftentimes inevitable changes last. The theory is applicable to multiple domains, including business, governance, health, sustainability, education, safety, security, equality, economy, and more.

Panel discussion

Masterclass

Have you ever tried to change something in yourself or others? How many times you have had a New Year’s resolution that succeeds? Most of us strive for better lives and try our best to achieve changes. However, we rarely get to celebrate victories in really transforming our habits, behaviors, and thoughts, thus changing our lives and businesses for good. This masterclass blends science and practice to help participants gaining rich understanding on how transformation works, what are its essential components, how to design and apply influential strategies, what novel technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and advanced sensing) are effectively facilitating change process, and what to do first thing each morning. Most of us already want changes for better. What we oftentimes miss is to know how to make such transformations succeed. This masterclass will help you develop and internalize the necessary competences.

Rapid technological evolution not only enables advanced innovations to emerge, but also requires to reconsider their effects on wellbeing. With novel technologies, such as artificial intelligence, smart sensing, blockchain, and autonomy, life changing transformations are inevitable. To succeed with these challenges, we have to be mindful about human nature playing its important role in every transformation. Research on human behavior provide principles that are applicable for creating novel technologies that go beyond solely improving their own performance, thus assisting with behavioral and attitudinal shifts in everyone involved. The Theory of Transforming Wellbeing (TTW) unifies knowledge about designing transforming technologies for wellbeing. It explains how technological innovations can go beyond limitations of traditional behavioral design and change management.

Adjunct to the

The dark patterns are interactive design patterns that influence technology users through deception or trickery, and which represent unethical applications of persuasive technology. However, our ability to identify dark patterns is limited, creating a situation where it is difficult to manage abuses of persuasive psychology, because it is difficult to even identify them. Although there are numerous practitioner taxonomies of dark patterns, there is no scientifically-based taxonomy available.

Through participatory exercises, participants helped to identify the theoretical-underpinnings that drive dark patterns, and contribute to the development of a taxonomy of dark patterns, based on consensus within the scientific community. In the workshop, we formed working teams who reviewed the dark pattern taxonomy, looking for alternative theoretical explanations. Each working team participated in a group sorting exercise, designed to inform the development of a theoretically-framed taxonomy of dark patterns. All outputs of the workshop were captured, and used to advance this study towards validation of the taxonomy. After the workshops, the authors of this paper plan to incorporate all the advancements into the next stage of the research, which will feed into a subsequent paper on a taxonomy of dark patterns, addressing the identified research questions.

Background

Dark patterns are interactive design patterns that influence technology users through deception, trickery or hostility, that make their lives difficult or contribute a negative impact, through intended or unintended design practices that represent unethical applications of persuasive technology [2]. Examples of dark patterns include getting people to purchase unnecessary insurance, signing up for products without knowing they are on recurring billing, exposing users to content that makes them feel bad about themselves in order to influence their behavior, environmental designs that are effectively ‘hostile’ to particular groups such as the homeless, cyclists or pedestrians.

Industry professionals have raised public awareness of dark patterns, and have taken steps to identify, collect, and describe dark patterns. Their efforts have helped draw attention to dark patterns [6]. However, there is no comprehensive practitioner taxonomy, they tend to lack a strong theoretical basis, and the taxonomies put forward draw on colloquial terms, rather than frameworks typically employed by the behavioral sciences.

Importance

There is a practical need to develop a science-based taxonomy of dark patterns that makes stronger links to behavioral science principles [4]. The existing taxonomies [3] can be greatly improved, through taking a more systematic approach that better identifies the theoretical underpinnings. We extend our definition of persuasive technology beyond the digital to illustrate a long history of darkness in persuasion, our idea is that our taxonomy should be holistic and applicable to different persuasive contexts. As the Internet of Things reaches further into our lives by digitally connecting physical objects and infrastructures, the persuasive effects of smart cities, smart transport and smart homes are likely to be profound.

For this reason, we have been carrying out a systematic review of information about programs, apps, behavioral and environmental designs that may contain dark patterns. This study is aimed at improving our understanding of persuasive technology by better describing what dark patterns are, identifying their theoretical underpinnings, and developing precise definitions that will both describe how to identify them, and how to describe when they are being applied [5]. We are also considering the ethical status of dark patterns in persuasive technology [1].

Goals and Research Direction

This workshop will support two goals. First, it provides an opportunity for participants to share knowledge regarding dark patterns, expressed appropriately, for example using visual depictions where necessary, and to discuss the psychological principles that explain their persuasiveness. Second, it will use participatory method, not just to engage participants, but also, to advance this project's goals of developing a taxonomy of dark patterns, that is more rooted in the behavioral science, by making stronger links between theory and practice. Participants will also be equipped to consider whether the use of dark patterns is ever ethically acceptable.

For the workshop, we have prepared a list of research questions to be discussed and further investigated:

What taxonomy of dark patterns aligns with the behavioral sciences?

What are the psychological mechanism driving dark patterns?

How do dark patterns differ from anti-patterns (backfires, misfires, outcomes of poor design)?

Why do people believe a design pattern constitutes a dark pattern?

How to define the boundaries from persuasive to manipulative to coercive?

Are there shades of darkness, from grey to black? How do we detect instances of dark patterns?

When does a dark pattern and a psychological backfire overlap?

What are the emotional impacts of dark patterns?

Examples

We have gathered real-life examples from persuasive and environmental technology that we or our informants regard as dark. Arguably, whilst users still have choices, by linking these examples to behavioral theory we intend to show that unconscious processes are triggered first and more strongly than the conscious processes required to make informed choices. The balance of knowledge is asymmetric in favor of giving the provider more power.

Structure and Outcomes

The workshop will start with an introduction followed by presentations on cognate topics, designed to provide background for the interactive exercise, overall:

Ethics of persuasive technology,

Resistance against manipulative behavior (trust in source, oxytocin and emotion),

Grey areas in our understanding of dark patterns.

Taxonomy of dark patterns (overview sheet and cards),

Interactive classification exercise (like delphi or Q-method),

Review of the data, discuss, and clean up the taxonomy based on group consensus.

Prior to the workshop, our team will have completed a systematic review of dark patterns, collecting examples in narrative and visual format, drawing on academic and practitioner sources. These will be aggregated into a list, that includes both simple examples with clear links to persuasion theory, and those that are more complex and not as easy to identify. Using expert review and consensus building, our team will develop the first taxonomy, that links dark patterns to principles routinely used in behavioral science, based on a grounded theory methodology, finalized through an expert review and consensual agreement. The final output will be a list of dark patterns, linked to theory and with an example of each pattern. These will be printed onto cards, so that each table in the workshop will have a list of dark patterns.

In the workshops, we will form working teams who will review the dark pattern taxonomy, looking for alternative theoretical explanations. Each working team will participate in a group sorting exercise, designed to inform the development of a theoretically-framed taxonomy of dark patterns. All outputs of the workshop will be captured, and used to advance this study towards validation of the taxonomy. After the workshops, the authors of this paper will incorporate all the advancements into the next stage of the research, which will feed into a subsequent paper on a taxonomy of dark patterns, addressing the identified research questions.

TSD embodies a fundamental understanding of the PT components that are essential for designing successful transformations, known as:

Socially Influencing Systems

Computer-Supported Influence

Persuasive Cities

Persuasive Backfiring

Persuasive Design for Sustainability

This knowledge of TSD empowers the scholars and designers participating in this tutorial session to create PT that makes behavioral and attitudinal changes last. Moreover, the tutorial also shares the knowledge about strategies from rhetoric, psychology, and neuroscience that lead to attitudinal transformations. By definition, this tutorial also transforms the way participants see the potential of PT in attaining long-term permanent behavioral changes at all scales, be it at individual, group, or societal levels.

Organizers

Motivation

Present knowledge on Persuasive Technology (PT) often reveals how behavior change designs and interventions are limited in sustaining their effects [6]. There is an increasing need for novel ways to create PT that helps people not only to achieve their goals, but also supports everyone to maintain their new habits. Such PT should ultimately empower people to succeed in their desired transformations. Therefore, this tutorial will cover conceptual frameworks for designing and evaluating PT aimed at achieving sustainable transformations of our lives towards wellbeing. The tutorial will introduce and explain how Transforming Sociotech Design (TSD) contributes to the existing PT knowledge by extending our understanding beyond limitations of traditional behavioral change designs and interventions.

Frameworks

This tutorial is highly instrumental for researchers and practitioners designing PT, as it will provide and help internalize scientific frameworks for achieving permanent behavior change. TSD embodies fundamental understanding of the PT components that are essential for designing successful transformations, known as Socially Influencing Systems [11], Computer-Supported Influence [10], Persuasive Cities [13], Persuasive Backfiring [12], and Persuasive Design for Sustainability [8].

Socially Influencing Systems

The framework of Socially Influencing Systems [11] describes perpetual mechanisms to foster user motivation as compared to conventional methods, such as those that are based incentives and punishments. Socially Influencing Systems harness social influence from crowd behavior to craft influential messaging aimed at shifting behavior and attitude of an individual, who naturally is an integral part of the same crowd. Such continuous interplay can ultimately result in an ongoing process that has the capacity to transform lives without any other mechanisms.

Computer-Supported Influence

The framework of Computer-Supported Influence [10] in the realm of PT distinguishes four types of persuasion, i.e. interpersonal persuasion, computer-mediated persuasion, computer-moderated persuasion, and human-computer persuasion. This framework outlines a sharper conceptual representation of the key terms in transforming design, drafts a structured approach for better understanding of the influence typology, and presents how computers can be moderators of social influence.

Persuasive Cities

The framework of Persuasive Cities [13] aims at improving wellbeing across societies through applications of socio-psychological theories and their integration with conceptually new urban designs. This research presents an ecosystem of future cities, describes three generic groups of people depending on their susceptibility to persuasive technology, explains the process of defining behavior change, and provides tools for social engineering of Persuasive Cities.

Persuasive Backfiring

The framework of Persuasive Backfiring [12] provides tools to aid academics and designers in the study of behavior change interventions that produce unintended negative outcomes, presents a taxonomy of backfiring causes, and describes an analytical approach containing the intention-outcome and likelihood-severity matrices. This framework also introduces and locates dark patterns within the PT research.

Persuasive Design for Sustainability

The framework on Persuasive Design for Sustainability [8] originates from two previously established frameworks of a cognitive dissonance model for persuasive design for sustainability and a system development lifecycle (SDLC) process in design for sustainability. The established SDLC of Persuasive Design for Sustainability introduces a novel methodology for designing solutions that confront the problems of developing a persuasive system that transforms behaviors towards a set goal like sustainability.

Impact

This tutorial will address highly important research direction that influences the future of PT and our ever-increasing technology-supported environments [13]. According to social sciences [1], environmental, personal, and behavioral factors are locked into triadic reciprocal determinism, meaning that all three are strongly interconnected and continuously reshaping each other. Thus, environmental design is a strong influencer on human behavior and attitude. In other words, quite often it is merely sufficient to improve our digitally-equipped spaces to achieve better lives [10]. This is a very powerful vision as it encompasses not only behavior change but also a potential transformation of human behavior at scale [13]. This collection of knowledge on TSD will empower the scholars and designers participating in this tutorial session to create PT that makes behavioral and attitudinal changes last. Moreover, the tutorial will share also knowledge about strategies from rhetoric [4], psychology [1, 5], neuroscience [2, 5], and social influence [11] that can lead to attitudinal transformation. By definition, this tutorial will also transform the way participants see the potential of PT in attaining long-term permanent behavioral changes at all scales, be it at individual, group, or societal levels.

Outcomes

The tutorial will provide participants with frameworks and models that has been proven to be effective in helping to achieve permanent behavior changes and attitudinal transformations. Knowledge about strategies from rhetoric [4], psychology [1, 5], neuroscience [2, 5], and social influence [11] will be put on the table for everyone to learn, experience, design, and apply. The strategies will be applied hands on to learn how to make a difference and achieve transformations using real-life issues. Participants will expand their horizons of how the various frameworks connect, sometimes overlap, complement each other, and can be effectively combined to solve some of the most essential behavioral challenges we have today.

The main outcome of this tutorial for our persuasive technology community members will be their more advanced knowledge about and immediate capacity of applying the fundamental strategies and frameworks for transforming lives. Outcomes of this tutorial are instrumental for various contexts, including health [3], eHealth [14], education, games [7], sustainability [8], safety, wellbeing [9], emergency management, ecology, and economy. Ultimately, more refined scientific knowledge on how to design permanent behavior changes will be generated and translated into applicable guidelines for our PT community to foster transformation for the betterment of our future.

Information technology and computer systems will be increasingly designed to change behavior and help achieve better lives [2-6]. TSD overviews and explains how various frameworks and models can help scholars and developers to create PT that facilitates desired transformative effects on users. Persuasive technologies [6] will reshape human behavior in countless ways and some will continue to misuse strategies and fail their responsibility towards the betterment of human lives. Thus, more effort has to be put into educating and training [7] researchers and designers not only with insights on how to change behavior, but also include the responsibility and ethical mindsets that should be followed.

Organizers

Prof. Agnis Stibe from the world-renowned MIT Media Lab will bring very fresh and novel way how to design transformation. He established research on future Persuasive Cities that encourage healthy and sustainable routines. Prof. Stibe believes that our world can become a better place thought purposefully designed urban spaces that successfully blend technological advancements with human nature. His research is built upon socio-psychological theories to design long-lasting transformations of our lives. Agnis is an active member of PT community, frequently speaking at annual conferences and effectively collaborating with industry. He has worked for a number of Fortune 100 companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. He has received awards from the MIT Media Lab, Nokia Foundation, and more.

Anne-Kathrine Kjær Christensenhas studied persuasive design at Aalborg University (cum laude) and was part of the Persuasive Technology community e.g. participating with a presentation at Persuasive 2007 at Stanford University regarding an article she wrote with Prof. Per Hasle. Since graduation in 2008 she has worked for both public and private companies. She has been the owner of her own company Specifii for about 3 years. She has worked as product owner for Telenor on a large omnichannel project and as product owner for the shipping company DFDS. She has also worked with customer insight + customer experience for several companies e.g. Dating.dk. Anne frequently speaks about Persuasive Technology at different meetups and conferences in Denmark.

Tobias Nyström is a researcher and PhD candidate with expertise in business studies and information systems. Tobias recent research has focused on sustainability combined with universal design, gamification, open innovation, system design, and persuasive technology. One of his papers, co-written with Moyen Mustaquim, was accepted to and presented at the PT conference in Chicago, IL, USA, April 2015.

Adjunct to the

About

This workshop will discuss the research efforts that are being made aimed at changing human behavior and attitude. It will engage the persuasive technology community to jointly look at where do we stand and where do we want to go with the field. In 2018, it will be fifteen years since the seminal book on persuasive technology was published. Since then, already twelve annual conferences have been held on the topic. The Persuasive Technology community has attracted many young scholars and has kept very strong core of leading scientists in the area of research. At the same time, not all expectations have been met over the last decade. Therefore, the community needs to come together and discuss ways for natural expansion and strategic growth. We need acknowledge weaknesses in the area of behavior change interventions and seek for ways to overcome them.

Opening

People have unique beliefs and values that shape up their personalities over time. However, not many act in accordance with their beliefs and values. It is not surprising to find a contradiction between peoples’ beliefs and actual actions. Such inconsistencies gave birth to the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance [1]. Indeed, it was this particular gap in peoples’ beliefs and actual actions that was recognized by academics, psychologists and researchers leading to the manifest role of Persuasive Technology to shape up human behavior.

Advancing

While several scholars studied human behavior and early interventions were designed to guide users through behavior change process [2,3], Brendryen and Kraft proposed that technology-based interventions had the potential to change people’s behaviors [4]. In 2003, Fogg introduced a new research area known as Persuasive Technology [5]. His work originates from Human Psychology and hence it is essential to understand the interplay between Psychology and Technology when interventions are developed to shape up human behavior. The research field of Persuasive Technology highlights the potential of technology as a tool for persuasion where the earlier acts both as a medium and a social actor [5]. Following Fogg’s work, researchers from around the globe started developing and analyzing persuasive technologies for a wide range of areas including but not limited to promotion of physical activity [6], saving energy [7], living happily [8], reducing soda consumption [9], managing mental disorders [10] and persuasive cities [11].

Learning from Success!

Available research largely provides evidence of learning from success. In other words, it is relatively hard to find scientific publications in the area of Persuasive Technology that highlight failures. This compels us to think whether we as researchers can learn from success only? Or is it so that our research settings are flawless that our research outcomes are always positive? It remains a fact that real knowledge is verified knowledge in a way that the knowledge base should be proven by intelligence or by (logical) evidence. Further, scholarly integrity in any research discipline demands that researchers should abstain from any unverified remarks [12]. In other words, we must disown biased and speculative results. We propose that the same should be practiced in the research field of Persuasive Technology. Persuasive Technology has received a great deal of attention from researchers who have developed stand-alone applications to promote desirable behaviors. However, a quick look at the previous proceedings indicates that researchers are still focused on application-driven studies with little attention to theoretical grounds. Hence there is a lack of balance between studying technologies and theories to support the work.

Bias?

Another area that calls for discussion is an evident lack of publications that has highlight failures. This is in line with a review of empirical studies by [13] who investigated a variety of persuasive information systems and reported that reviewed studies primarily reported fully positive and partially positive effects [13]. We argue that partial reason for absence of publications that report failures is because of publication bias that pertains to acceptance of only those manuscripts that have statistically significant level of results while all other submissions are more or less rejected. Similar reservations have also been put forward by [14].

This, in a way, is publication suppression that obstructs what could otherwise prove to be quality papers from being accepted. When it comes to Persuasive Technology this would result in serious inaccuracy rates in available literature. There is substantial evidence that convinces the existence of publication bias. Banks and colleagues propose that the degree of publication bias has grown to such an extent that available research results are unreliable of all research. Further, they highlight that publication bias is one of the greatest threats to the legitimacy of meta-analytic articles, which in turn are among the most significant instruments for advancing scientific research [14]. There could be several reasons for publication bias. One being authors’ decision. In simple terms, authors have more control of their data. A classic example would be a situation where authors would not submit their work because of small sample size, statistically insignificant results or because of findings that contradict previous research.

Heading Where?

The issue of publication bias applies to almost all the research disciplines and the research area of Persuasive Technology is no exception. Here, we would highlight another issue that is similar to publication bias. This critical issue is what we generally call as conflict of interest. If we go through the proceedings of all the conferences on Persuasive Technology, it becomes crystal clear that prominent names seem to appear both in the scientific committees as well as in the list of authors of accepted publications. This is a clear case of conflict of interest, one would argue. While there is no substitute for experience and we can never underestimate the contribution of senior researchers, yet it seems relatively clear that the research area of Persuasive Technology is in what might call as “rigid control” of a few. As an example, consider the International Conference on Persuasive Technology. One would notice that a high majority of Steering Committee remain the same and secondly, most of them have at least one paper published in the proceedings.

Outcomes

The proposed workshop aims to bring researchers together to a forum that facilitates constructive discussion and debate. The research area of Persuasive Technology is receiving increasing interest from across the globe and deservingly so. Yet it is observed that the audience at Persuasive Technology conferences revolves mainly around the same crowd with a few exceptions. It is anticipated that the workshop will provide an opportunity for researchers from different disciplines to address the issue and come up with constructive recommendations leading to a change for the advancement of Persuasive Technology Community.

Midden, C., & Ham, J. (2009, April). Using negative and positive social feedback from a robotic agent to save energy. In Proceedings of the 4th international conference on persuasive technology (p. 12). ACM.